“Finished your outline, Betty?” Lois called out as the girls were leaving the schoolroom after the last bell one afternoon.
“Certainly not,” answered Betty excitedly. “I started to read just the first scene, but when I got to ‘By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world,’ at the beginning of the second scene, why I just read on all the last period.”
It was the first lesson of the Freshman class on “The Merchant of Venice.” They had finished Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” and this was their first taste of Shakespeare.
“Hadn’t you read it before?” questioned Polly. “I have, and I adore it.”
“Adore what?”
It was Lois speaking, of course. She had a habit of coming up unexpectedly and hearing the last couple of words of a sentence.
“The Merchant of Venice,” explained Polly. “Have you started it?”
“Yes. I read it, the last two periods. I’m as far as ‘My Daughter! O my ducats!’ I nearly died laughing over Launcelot Gobbo.”
It was a miserable day; the sun seemed to have abdicated in favor of his brother, the storm cloud, and the rain was falling in torrents. Betty turned disconsolately towards the window. They were standing in the schoolroom corridor.
“Looks as if we were in for another deluge,” she groaned. “Not even a chance of a let-up. Now, if it would only freeze!”